So Many Books and So Little Time!

So after panicking in class last Tuesday that I did not have enough work done or things read, and I am not truly sure where my thesis is heading anymore, six of my inter library loan books came in by the end of the week! Now the books are pretty big and all written in Spanish, so it is going to take me some time to actually get any useful information from them, but at least I have somewhere to go with my research now. The only problem is the biggest book that came in, from the Yale library, is due back by the end of the month, which is definitely not enough time for me to read it all (thanks Yale). The book literally covers art made throughout all wars in Spain, so yeah I am going to have to start sifting through that now to be able to get it back in time.

Other than the update on new reading materials, I did get a response back from the Reina Sofia last week in regards to requesting documents/information on their collection. All they sent me was a research request form to fill out (which I am not sure why that wasn't on their website in the first place), and since sending that back last week I have not heard anything. It isn't the best feeling in the world that they haven't responded in over a week, but I am still holding out a little hope. If this doesn't pan out, I am thinking of a plan B research question that still uses everything I have done so far this semester. 

Continuing to Research and the Challenges of not Living in Spain

As I mentioned in our last class before break, I reached out to my art history professor from Spain, asking him if he knew of any resources I can look over in relation to my working thesis topic (which is how art made during the Spanish Civil War influenced the Reina Sofia's collection and how the museum used the collection to tell the story of the civil war). He was generous enough, not only to respond super quickly but with a large amount of resources, which was great initially, but I soon found it a challenge to find any of the articles/journals he references online. I followed up with him over break, asking if any of the sources were available online, and unfortunately he said that none of them were digitized, and I would have to contact the institutions and ask if they could do it for me and send over copies. So that threw a wrench in my plans, here I was thinking I had so many great resources but most of them I need to be in Spain to access. 😓 

I can't let that stop me however, so I am trying to see if the topics have been written about in English, in databases that I can access, and also going through the sources and seeing which ones I am most interested in so I can send some emails to the Spanish institutions in hopes that they will help me out. In the mean time, my intern library loan came in last week so I am excited to start reading that and see if it will lead me to any new sources. I also read the article my professor in Spain wrote when he worked at the Reina Sofia, and to my surprise it was a very critical article on how modern and contemporary art museums do a disservice to visitors by not providing proper historical contexts with their works. His main focus was the second floor permanent exhibit surrounding Guernica in the Reina Sofia, and how the museum does not properly explain the history of the The Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Paris 1937) which Guernica was made for and first displayed at. It really has me rethinking my experience in that museum and how it would have meant so little if I did not already have a general understanding of the history and the artist.

Early Research Challenges

One of the ideas I had for my research project was to look into the history of my house, which has been inhabited by RIT students for many years, and analyze what it could tell us about RIT student culture or perhaps college house culture in general. The issues I've run into in my early research is that this house has not (to my knowledge) been afflicted with many of the problematic tendencies of greek life houses at large universities, which have seen extensive prior research. In searching for peer-reviewed articles similar to the type of research I'd planned to do, the vast majority of the articles I've encountered are studies on the culture of binge drinking, hazing, and sexual assault in frat houses. It is difficult to find research related to the less sinister sides of college house culture.

I contacted our COLA librarian Cami Goldowitz asking for help refining my search terms to find more relevant articles, and that has helped me start to tend more in the right direction. Cami recommended me some search term improvements to help me find some more relevant results, as well as directed me towards some articles she found that are closer to what I am searching for in terms of the social culture of student housing. These have all been helping to direct me closer to what I am searching for, though I am not sure I have yet found prior research that matches exactly what I am planning to do. I am thinking of expanding my search to look more broadly for research on specific houses, not necessarily related to college student housing, and more into general student culture research, not necessarily about housing. Perhaps by looking at these separately, I can get a better idea of how to effectively combine them in abscense of a exact prior example.

Introduction

Hello! I’m Noelle, I’m a third year museum studies major, but this is my sixth (and hopefully final) year at RIT.  I’m from Gloucester, Massachusetts, where this past summer I interned at a small museum called Maritime Gloucester.  Because of this, I would like my thesis topic to have something to do with Gloucester, especially the maritime history that I was surrounded by the last few months.  It may be tough to narrow it down, because Gloucester is home to a very deep, rich history, which offers no shortage of topics to explore.  Gloucester is also home to my three cats, Pippa (brown tabby), Louis (light orange), and Mina (gray).

Hello :)

 Hello, I'm Delaney a 4th-year museum studies major with a minor in Anthropology. I am from Macedon, a small town in Wayne county, about 30 minutes from Rit. I have 2 dogs, Penny and Gabby. As of right now, my topic idea involves voting rights for women of color, Idk if I wanna stay within Rochester or find my way out of the town and see if I can find information on a city with the least amount of women of color's votes is the 1960s ... if that makes sense 

 I thought I posted this sooner but it was sitting in the blog as a draft 

Starting to Research

So I am starting to do some research on the Spanish Civil War and the art created during that time period! After class last Tuesday, I went over to Ritter on Ice and took out one of the books that came up when Cami searched the Spanish Civil War. I haven't gotten too far into it, but based on the intro and a quick skimming of the chapters it seems to go in depth on how Surrealist art in Spain began to branch away from its origins in France, since Spanish artists wanted to move away from the dream like state of surrealism and instead use the movement to address the war. I have also been looking into some more articles about Dali in particular and his depictions of war despite his claim to be an "apolitical" painter. Speaking of Dali, my copy of one of his autobiographies finally came in the mail and I am excited to start reading it! While it may help with research, it was more of a personal interest purchase because I have been wanting to 'get inside' Dali's mind so to speak. So far all I know is that Dali hated spinach because of its "utterly amorphous character." :)

Introduction

Hi everyone! I'm Gabby, a 4th year Museum Studies and Spanish double major, with a goal by graduation to be a art history minor as well. I am from Scotia, NY which is about 20 minutes away from Albany. I don't know if I mentioned it during class, but last semester I studied abroad in Madrid, Spain, and had an amazing time exploring the capital and visiting many museums (and of course practicing my Spanish language skills)! I mention this because I am definitely thinking about doing a thesis topic related to Spanish art/museums. I have a couple of ideas forming at the moment, but the one I am most interested in doing research on, is how the development of the Reina Sofia Museum's collection, consisting mainly of 20th century art, was heavily influenced by the Spanish Civil War and the art produced at the time (whether propaganda or major works such as Picasso's Guernica). Unfortunately, I do not have a pet photo to share, since I have no pets so, I give you an example of the art in the Reina Sofia. It is a sketch to a piece made by Salvador Dali in 1935 entitled, Premonition of the Civil War.

 

Introduction and Topic

Hi everyone! My name is Kosovare. I am a fourth-year Museum Studies major with minors in Criminal Justice and Sociology. I'm from Rochester, living in Henrietta. I'm still working on narrowing down/solidifying my research topic, but it will be on prison libraries and inmates' access to educational resources. Since others are posting their pets, here's my Freya. I adopted her two weeks ago and she's two years old. She's a glutton but very sweet (and small).

Hello/ Topic idea

Hello, Jill here for those of you that don't know me I'm a 4th Year Museum Studies major with an ASL and Deaf Studies minor. I'm from South Jersey about 15 minutes on a good day from Philadelphia. I have a mini Aussie doodle named Luna who is almost 2 she is the smaller one in the photo. The other is one of my sister's dogs a pitbull named Elanor or Ellie. I also live with my partner's cat named Aires. A fun fact about me is that my sister is a sign langue interpreter here at RIT. As of right now, my topic will be on the Jewish Poor People's lot that was rediscovered in 2006. I know it's a broad topic, so I'm working on refining that but am unsure how. My current plan is to research a family or the lives of one of the people buried in this lot. Maybe find out more about the Jewish history of Rochester.

MUSE 489 is up and running...

 And the students are amazing! 

Final poster submission

Our class submitted the final posters today! I am excited to say that the poster part of the capstone is almost completed. Next week we have the COLA Capstone Poster Session, which I am very excited for. I hope that my poster turns out exactly the way I expected so that I can talk to my peers about posters haha. I changed much of the text so that it reads smoother and is more concise. I also included an example label copy along with 3 posters the label copy is referring to. Next is completing the thesis. 

Poster draft progress

 Last week we had our second poster session of the semester where we all received feedback from faculty on our posters. This was very helpful in my next steps for the poster. In the poster session I received feedback on shortening the text in the poster, reorganizing photographs, and cleaning up the poster overall. After making theses adjustments my poster looked a lot nicer and hopefully ready to be finalized on Monday after the thesis board looks over the text.

Thesis full draft progress

 Last week we handed in the full drafts of our thesis. In completing this I felt very good at where I was at in the writing process. To complete my full draft I had to add the project part of my thesis to the paper as well as some other elements. The large part of what I added was label copy and wall text script to the full draft. I also added a playlist that can be played and downloaded at the exhibit. I also added the appendix which includes all of the posters I will be using for the exhibit along with photos of 1960s counterculture in San Francisco. 

Thesis Progress

The project is going okay. I'm still just working in Tableau and trying to make dashboards that look nice and accurately present the appeal of green infrastructure. I'm getting work done but it feels like the project has been in more or less the same spot for awhile now. My thesis board meeting is supposed to be this week, so I can get some feedback on what I have, make some more adjustments, and then hopefully be ready to schedule some kind of user testing to write about in my paper. The first draft of the final thesis is due in one week. If I get done everything that I want to get done this week, I think I will have enough content for most of a paper. But I still won't be able to talk too much about my findings or conclusions yet, so it won't really be a complete draft.

I think the poster is going to come out really good but I can't work on it anymore until I have more progress on the actual project. 

I also made a trello awhile ago to help me keep track of it but I don't update it very often.

https://trello.com/b/W5iQwuTd/living-breathing-data

And my final title is now Living Breathing Data: Sharing and Interpreting Green Infrastructure Data to Promote Behavioral Change

data 😤

Thesis Progress

 Recently, we shifted some of our focus from the thesis paper to the poster, which has been a nice change of pace. I really enjoyed working on the poster, even though there were definitely times I became creatively frustrated trying to figure out how to include everything I wanted without going overboard. The peer review and charette were extremely helpful and it they both gave me ideas about how to continue to fix my poster. 

Also, for the past few weeks I have not been making much progress on my thesis, but recently I feel like I have very had a break through. I think that if I sit down and make some foundational changes to what I already have then I will really make some headway moving forward. 

Blog 3 Hannah Riley

 We have started working on our posters for our thesis presentations. I have had a lot of fun developing the poster for my project. I have included two posters from the collection in the thesis poster. These posters share similar colors so I pulled the vibrant colors from those posters for the design of my thesis poster. I feel good about the overall concept of my thesis poster. I have started to develop label copy for the posters in the exhibit and organizing categories for the exhibit. I am hoping that I don't struggle too much with writing the label copy. 

Second Semester - Week 5

 These past few weeks, I have made a return to research and my sources. As a few people have now told me, I need to refill my brain before I can easily write again. I sort of wanted to just put all of my thoughts on paper and then find sources to support them, but for a paper this long that's definitely the backwards approach. So, I am spending my afternoons diving back into my sources, the old ones as well as some very interesting new ones. I've begun some research into Connor Prairie's "Follow the North Star" program, which is incredibly intriguing. Now, I just have to decide if all of my opinions and arguments about the pros and cons of second-person interpreting will fit into this paper. It's exciting to feel like I maybe have too much instead of too little. Diving back into the sources has also reminded me of my passion for this topic, and why I decided to write about it. I'm feeling passionate again, and that's a very good sign!

Week 4 second semester

Last week we had 8 new pages due for our thesis. It felt good to add on some additional pages outside of the literature review. I focused on writing a methodology section for my paper explaining my process in choosing a topic for the exhibit of the posters and explaining how I selected the posters for the exhibit. In class we peer reviewed each others papers, which helped me realize what other steps I need to take to organize my paper. It was helpful and motivating to see where my classmates are in their papers. My next steps are to look at the material that I have already written and reorganize it to create my introduction, separating out some of the content in my literature review.   

Week 3 of Second Semester

 This week we had 8 new pages due for thesis. I was excited to actually get started on writing the paper, but I unfortunately had some technical issues and did not get to write as much as I hoped. The writing process was a bit slow going because I needed to go back to a lot of my sources and do more research, which was beneficial, but took more time than I had anticipated. I learned so much more by actually going through and really reading my sources, and it was thrilling to learn things about my topic that I didn't even know! I need to fix my abstract and my introduction, but for now, I am focusing more on the body of the body and then will go back and refine the parts that need changing. 

research research research

With the first big thesis deadline of the semester, I'm solidifying how I enjoy organizing. I work better when I can physically move around my sources and the paragraphs I've written. When writing my literature review, I took notes on my sources on index cards. I've continued to do this and it's been so helpful to be able to line them up to see where I'd like to highlight them in my thesis. I also printed my literature review before adding to it to cut out each paragraph and test out where they might work better and flow smoother for my thesis. Hopefully this style of organization will continue to help me as we move along!

Thesis Second Semester: Week Two

     Tomorrow is the first major checkpoint of this paper -- eight new pages due. I'm excited to finally start putting my ideas down into these cohesive sentences, but also worried as well. I think what I'm struggling with the most right now is correctly and smoothly incorporating my sources. I find myself wanting to write a bunch of sentences that need to be backed up by a source, and just add a note that says "find and add a source later." However, I know that will make the work a lot harder for later me. All that being said, I'm trying to remember that these eight pages are a first draft. They don't have to be perfect; they're not going to be perfect. Just getting them done is a huge step.

Thesis week 2 (second semester)

 Since going on winter break, I've been a little slow to get started on really diving into this project because school started. I felt like I got a lot of research done over break and had a break through with what direction to go in in terms of the exhibit concept I am working on. Now, I want to start developing that concept through poster selection, developing a theme for the exhibit, and label copy. I have been working on including a timeline into the exhibit.